IC 3586

IC 3586 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 81 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 27,000 ly, about 27% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 81 million years ago.

Because its light is 81 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3586 as it looked roughly 81 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).